World – Page 38

Put Up or Shut Up

In response to some typically Canadian ankle-biting, the Indepundit quotes Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

For all those who whinge about Afghanistan and Iraq, what are you doing to make the world a better place. Not “talking about,” but “doing.”

Rewriting History

The usual anti-American irony: the BBC published a book in 2002 claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained his chemical and biological weapons and was making more.

Betrayal

Via ESR comes a link to a trenchant essay: How the Left Betrayed My Country.

And so I have become disillusioned, at least with the Leftists I met in Iraq. So noble in their rhetoric, they looked to the stars, yet ignored what was happening around them, caring only about what was inside their minds. So glorious in their ideals, their thoughts were inflexible and their deeds unnecessary, even harmful.

What Media Bias?

The talk of the blogosphere this morning is an outrageously biased New York Times story on the blog Iraq the Model.

When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A C.I.A. operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? Until he picked up the phone, he was just a ghost on the Internet.

As others have said, where’s the outrage as in the Plame case? At any rate, if the author had bothered to read the Fadhil brothers’ blog, she quickly would have realized there was way too much local colour for the site to be anything other than what it appeared to be.